The Heist: How to Produce an Award-Winning Investigative Series with Sally Herships

This transcript was auto-generated from an audio recording. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Every creator I know experiences this phenomenon. You get a brilliant idea for a long form series, maybe an investigation. You imagine who you want to talk to and how you'll structure it. You're already painting scenes in your mind and then something happens. You get into it and you despair. You think, oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into?

Sally Herships 

No one's going to get back to me. I'm not going to find anything, the claim we have is wrong. That's just par for the course, I think.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

That is Sally Herships. You may know her name. She is the multiple award winning reporter behind The Heist, the astonishingly fun podcast from the center for Public Integrity that blew open an enormous swindle: Trump's 2017 tax cut. Or maybe you know Sally's name because she directs Columbia University's audio journalism program or because she founded Radio Boot Camp, one of the best training programs out there. Which is all to say, Sally Herships is highly accomplished. And yet she, too, suffers from this phenomenon and relearns again and again how to get to the truth. How to tackle complicated subjects like taxes and transform them into utter audio magic. You want to learn her secrets for getting to the bottom of things people want to hide and for transforming massive amounts of information into stories you have to listen to? 

Stick around. We're about to show you just how she does it. 

This is Sound Judgment, where we investigate what it takes to become a beloved host by pulling apart one episode at a time together. I'm Elaine Appleton Grant.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Sally Herships, I am so delighted to have you here.

Sally Herships 

I'm so happy to be here. Thank you.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

I asked you and I asked everybody, tell me either your favorite episode or one that you found very challenging to make. You chose the second episode in this five part series, which is called Mnuchin’s World. So let's get into it. Sally, I want to dissect your intro. Storytellers, I love this introduction. It's a bit of a long clip, so hang in there. It's going to set up the rest of our discussion.

Clip from The Heist:

You may have seen this photo. It went viral. It's the one where Steven Mnuchin—he's Secretary of the Treasury—and his wife Louise Linton are at the Bureau of Engraving. She's got a blonde ponytail and she's dressed all in black, including long leather gloves, and they're holding up sheets of money, grinning. Here's Mnuchin on Fox News talking about it.

Mr. Secretary, some folks say that you two look like two villains from a James Bond movie. I'm sure you've heard that. I guess my question is, what were you thinking? 

I heard that. I never thought I'd be quoted as looking like villains from the James Bond. I guess I should take that as a compliment that I look like a villain in a great, successful James Bond movie.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

But let me just—so this was just the best clip. I love it. Why devote the second episode to who is Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary? Take me back to the conversations where you decided this would be a good direction to go in.

Sally Herships 

He was just a really unusual dude for a Treasury Secretary! He didn't have a really big background in politics. He had credits as a Hollywood producer. He had donated money to both political parties. Not only did he not have a big track record in politics, he didn't have a political persona. He wasn't someone whose name you would associate with politicians. And what was sort of spectacularly strange was that he had done work with George Soros, who—I think we talk about in the episode—is not a favorite name of the Republican Party, but he goes on to do work—Mnuchin, not Soros—with Donald Trump. So it was just really odd. And so we wanted to focus on this very unlikely character with so much power making these decisions.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

So I noticed a couple of things in particular about this scene. First, it's visual. It's incredibly compelling. There's a mystery. So as listeners, we already want to hang in and find out what's going on. But second, while you're not expressly telling the listener what to think or how you feel about Mnuchin, the connotation is pretty obvious. We are not going to be talking about a good guy. So at what point in your reporting or in the story editing process did you decide to start the episode with this scene?

Sally Herships 

That was actually a last minute—not last minute, but it was a late in the stage decision. It was, I think, a really important scene to include because a lot of people, when you're like, two words, Steven Mnuchin! They're like, who? People don't know who this guy is. But when you say, hey, remember the picture of the guy who was the Treasury Secretary holding up sheets of money and dressed like a Bond villain? They're like, oh, right. So we knew we wanted to include that scene. And obviously it says a lot about who he is and his personality. 

And we had started off with sort of, I think, a drier scene about legislation. But taxes, though I like to think they're super interesting, can run the risk of being a little dry. And when we were working with the composer, our wonderful, wonderful composer, who I totally fangirl about, Nina Perry, she had written this music, which I think really goes a long way into telling listeners who he is. It's like dark chocolate syrupy, super tone setting, just kind of swirling around our ears. And it was when she had written the music, I think the editor, Curtis Fox, and I were like, let's just rearrange and put this up top. 

So that's when we decided, although I do want to say that we hold strictly to journalistic ethics, and I wouldn't say that he's a bad guy or a good guy, just that we're doing our best to report the facts as we find them.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

I'm sure that you thought about that, right, when you used that scene? Because it does obviously point the listener in a very clear direction. And because of its placement at the very beginning, it also sets a tone.

Sally Herships

Yeah, absolutely. We were definitely pointing out that here was a Secretary of the Treasury taking a photo in what kind of looked like he was dressed like a Bond villain. We did point that out.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Yes, exactly. And the black gloves on his wife and so forth. 

I find that very interesting. You're the second person I've talked to whose decisions were influenced by the sound design and by the sound designer. And the first person who I talked to was Gilbert King who is one of the co-hosts of Bone Valley. And their sound designer was with them in early story crafting meetings, which was fascinating. Is that what you did?

Sally Herships 

Yeah, I think from working with Nina, which I've gotten to do a couple of times and count myself so lucky, I don't like the idea of music as something you put on at the end like lipstick or blush. I think it should be like part of your outfit planning from the beginning. It's just such a powerful tool. You can create emotion. I mean, one of the interesting things about that scene is you can hear right away that Steven Mnuchin, everything else aside, in audio is not what we call a good talker. And so I think music became even more important. There's, like, drum and all these different notes in there to help create personality and energy.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Sometimes, Sally, people ask me, well, what do you mean by a good talker? How do you define what a good talker is?

Sally Herships 

I mean, I think, bottom line, someone you want to listen to. Yeah. And I have talked to, as a lot of reporters have, a lot of experts in my career. And sometimes when I would get a little frustrated with experts, I would say smart people don't sound smart, smart people sound accessible. And I think that's really important too, right? You can be an impressive talker. You can use lots of big, fancy words. But if no one understands you and people press fast forward, it sort of doesn't matter. So I think ultimately we keep coming back to this: someone I want to talk to. And that can mean so many different things.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

All good stories start with a central question. I wanted to hear from Sally about the importance of a central question for the series and for this episode, Mnuchin's World. In particular, I wanted to know how the team used these questions to guide their reporting and their writing. So I played her this clip from early in the episode.

Clip from The Heist:

He's Treasury Secretary during the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. He has a lot of power, but somehow he manages to fly under the radar. And four years into Trump's presidency, which has had a lot of hirings and firings and drama, Mnuchin is still there. So I wanted to know, who is this guy and what does he tell us about how power works in Trump's Washington? I'm Sally Herships. Welcome.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Talk to me about the conversations you may have had about those two questions around this episode.

Sally Herships 

I think the central question of the series was holding power to account, looking at these promises to see if they checked out. The American people were promised these results for the tax bill. Did they happen? And I think we were really interested in getting behind the scenes, pulling back the curtain. I remember talking about how we wanted it to be something that you would pick up in the dentist’s office, like a copy of People magazine. 

And that's part of this episode, Mnuchin’s World, is taking a look at how power works in Trump’s America, which was one of the big ideas we were interested in exploring. Let's get into the weeds. Like, you need this spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, because we could otherwise could just write up our findings and just present them to people. Right? I see you nodding, yes, yes. But we have to also include narrative elements to make it interesting. And it is dramatic and it is kind of crazy and funny and dark and has unexpected turns and all the things. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Yeah. And the driving question of this episode, as you say in this clip, is, who is this guy? But my feeling is we wouldn't really care who this guy is without the second half of the question. What does he tell us about how power works in Trump's Washington? It seems to me these two questions together are such a crucial part of setting out on the reporting in the first place and then crafting an episode out of reams and reams of gathered information. It sounds so easy, right? When you just listen to it. But this is a part of the process where reporters and editors struggle and where people very often go completely off the rails. At least that's been my experience as an editor a lot of times. What do you think?

Sally Herships 

Yeah, I 110%, 1000% agree. I mean, pictures are coming to my mind. We were in Washington, DC, all the people, team members, sitting around a big conference table. And we had brought in the wonderful Alison MacAdam as kind of a consulting, contributing editor, and I think by that point probably had done some writing of language. And she would come in and get in there and tinker with her writer's wrench and screwdriver and just make everything better. But it was usually like, hey, guys, that's great. Let me delete everything you've written and rewrite it. 

So, yeah, it's really hard. And you have to have your shopping list going to the grocery store, right. You have to know ahead of time at the beginning exactly what you're going to get. Otherwise you're going to end up with a lot of random ingredients and not know what the heck you're making.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

How long did it take you to go, well, okay, so we want to hold Trump, the Trump administration, to account for its promises. To figure out very sharply crafted driving questions and to use those as guidelines for this is how we're going to report and this is how this is going to fit into the reporting?

Sally Herships 

The hardest part was at the very front, was describing the language for what we wanted to accomplish. And once that was locked down, although the journalist in me of course wants to fact check everything, the specific dividing it up became a little easier. So for example, one thing we could have done that we didn't was make this like five sad stories. We could have just been like, here's someone at the end of the income stick you don't want to be at who got audited really unfortunately, and got sacked with—stuck with a huge tax bill. And here's another one. Oh, guess what? Episode number three, gonna have another sad story! I mean, that was a decision we made early on, and instead we decided to look at the powerful characters, the ones you would want to read at the dentist’s office or when you're getting your nails done or something. 

So I think once we made those initial decisions, the individual episodes became easier. There are key players you need to look at. The Secretary of the Treasury.

Elaine Appleton Grant

The wealthy donor.

Sally Herships

The wealthy donor, the big corporate player. Everything else didn't fall into place. That would be understating it, but it felt less horrifyingly,challenging. And of course there were individual reporters brought things too, right, areas of ideas and expertise of their own.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

You run the audio journalism program at Columbia. What's the most common way that reporters sort of fall off the rails when it comes to understanding even the concept of having one single central question that you're trying to answer?

Sally Herships 

What we talk about in class is it all comes back to the pitch. You have to know what your story is. I think a mistake that a lot of students or people starting out can make is they'll have a question. But a pitch isn't a question. A pitch has to be a question and an answer, and it has to explain why it matters. And so a lot of times students will have a question. We try to explain to them, this is a perfectly great question, seems like a nice question, but we don't know if there's an interesting newsworthy consequential answer. Why don't you find out the answer to the question and revise your pitch? You don't want to go to the protest or go to the city council meeting and find out that it's just wah-wah, not that interesting. So I think that is a really key place to start. You've got to be nailed down from the beginning.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

So how much of this story was nailed down when you signed on to it?

Sally Herships 

I think a fair amount of big picture material was nailed down. Economists had weighed in. Professors had weighed in. There's a whole sort of—it's pretty geeky, but there's like a whole fun section on trickle down theory. Ask most economists, and they will say over and over, it doesn't work. Right? And there's a woman professor in here who's great. She's like, it doesn't work. It's never worked. I can hear the rhythm in my head, it never works…

Clip from The Heist:

Does it work? No. Never works, right? It never works. 

Sally Herships

Like a little song. So a lot of that stuff was nailed down. The issue was in getting people to talk about Mnuchin. Or Sarah Kleiner, this amazing reporter who got a wealthy donor to talk, a wealthy Republican donor to talk on the record. I mean, that's the kind of amazing stuff that came later.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

So there's this concept called the reporter's quest. Storytellers, these days we hear it all the time. In true crime, a reporter in first person describes their detective work. If you haven't yet listened to my conversation with Bone Valley co-hosts Gilbert King and Kelsey Decker, it's a great example of a reporter's quest. It kind of goes like this.

Clip from The Heist:

I made multiple requests for an interview with Steven Mnuchin to the Treasury. They got back to me, but they ignored the request for an interview. So I reached out to everybody that I could in his life. I emailed his middle school teachers, wrote to people at the Treasury who were afraid to give their names. I even reached out to the rabbi at the temple his mother used to go to, and here's what I found.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

The sheer volume of the facts in this 130 minute episode is amazing. Now, a casual listener may not even notice it because they're woven in there so expertly and smoothly, but it's pretty overwhelming. And I was really drawn by the fact that, first of all, you're saying at the beginning, this is my process, and I reached out to a gazillion people, like middle school teachers. 

Tell me about your process, Sally. Is this something that you always do?

Sally Herships 

I mean, for investigative work? I think it's pretty common. The project we're working on now, I think our spreadsheet has, I want to say, 390 or over 400 contacts in it, although a lot of people are deceased. When you're trying to unearth information from the past, things you can't just type into Google and easily pull up, you have to search a different kind of sources. Human beings! We're upright, we walk on two feet! And they can be hard to find. 

That's the part I honestly like doing and find the most peaceful and relaxing, is just having a spreadsheet and names and just, all right, next on the list, who am I going to call? Who am I going to email? 

It is also probably important to point out from a narrative perspective that we were not originally planning to tell this story from the perspective of a reporter's quest. Like, right, I reached out to this many people. We did that, I think for two reasons. One, because we had started kind of working on this maybe after contracts were signed or in earnest in January of a particular year. And then when March of that year rolled around, mid March, everyone got sort of worried about something called the coronavirus. 

And so we had to make a lot of changes really quickly. Sounds silly now or hard to remember. Maybe not silly, but we were told, don't leave your apartment. Right. Don't leave your house. So I felt like narratively, I think the feeling was we had to use the reporter's quest as a way to create some kind of drama.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Oh, that's interesting. So if COVID hadn't happened, you might not have included that bit. I was wondering why you included it early on.

Sally Herships 

Yeah, I mean, I think it is important to mention because it does illustrate that the person we were investigating, Steven Mnuchin, is a powerful person. People are afraid to talk about him, that all these circles and levels of people close to him would not talk. I think that's important to include, but I don't know that we would have framed the episode in this way.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Speaking of your spreadsheet, I'm curious, and again, this is something that you probably take for granted. You've carved out, okay, we've got our five episodes. We know who's working on which ones. What's your next step in creating that reporting plan? Is it to create this spreadsheet?

Sally Herships 

I don't think it was like, I'm going to sit down and make a spreadsheet of 200 people. It was more like, let's start with this person. Who else can talk? And then obviously, the question every reporter asks, every source is, who else should I talk to? And I got a lucky break in that a particular source basically leaked me a spreadsheet of contacts of people who had worked in the Treasury. I don't remember if it was 50 names, 80 names, 100 names, but I was just going down that list, copy pasting, tweaking as I went, my outreach email until I felt like I got a good email cooked up that was getting responses at least. At first I wasn't getting any responses. Then people started responding, so I was like, all right, I'm cracking the code. That felt like a big moment.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Oh, that's great. So your first email, you weren't getting any responses, and then you cracked the code. 

What was the difference? What did you change?

Sally Herships 

Coffee. In the subject line, I wrote coffee, and I can't remember if I wrote a question mark. I think I removed any scary references to journalism. I definitely took out the word interview. I must have included the fact that I was a reporter, but I definitely took out any mentions of an interview. I was like, I'm working on a story on XYZ. Would you be open to having a brief virtual coffee via Zoom? Because that's what everyone was doing. Or the phone. And then at least people would respond and be like, no. And some said yes. I mean, that's the thing. Some ultimately said yes.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Are you still using that kind of tactic now?

Sally Herships

I have. Absolutely, yes. For investigative outreach to sources who I don't want to scare people away, sure, I'll just try to keep things as neutral as possible.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

I think people want to know that sort of thing, because it can be scary to know that eight out of ten people you're going to reach out to are either not going to get back to you or they're going to say no. And so how do you get beyond that? And that's so simple.

Sally Herships 

Coffee. That doesn't work with all kinds of sources. But in this particular circumstance, it it did seem to work.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

So it did sound like you ran into a lot of dead ends. And that's in the text of the episode, you know, so and so wouldn't talk to me because they're scared, et cetera. Was there a point where you thought, this story may not work?

Sally Herships 

Oh, yeah. I think that's super normal in investigative stories, as I'm sure you know. And my friend Hilka Schellmann, she's a great investigative journalist. She's German. I don't want to butcher her accent, but she always says this very reassuring thing to me, you're in the murky middle. You're in the murky middle. So that's a totally normal place where you're like, oh, my God. No one's going to get back to me. I'm not going to find anything. The claim we have is wrong. That's just par for the course, I think. It's like hostess nerves before a party. No one's going to come. It’ll be me and the cat at our podcast by ourselves.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

When that happens to you now… 

Sally Herships

Do I feel good?

No. I still feel totally and utterly panicked. And, yeah, I'll go to bed, my husband will be like, what's wrong? And I'm just like, I don't want to talk to you, I don’t want to talk to anyone.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

And what breaks that? Is it when you finally get a break.

Sally Herships 

It's when you finally get a break.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

In a recent episode, I interviewed Katie Colaneri, who leads audio documentary production at New Hampshire Public Radio. So in stories, we're always looking for surprises, for left turns, but I really loved how Katie refers to them. She told me, we're always looking for a holy shit moment. So I asked Sally about something that felt like a holy shit moment to me, and it got a little awkward because what surprised me didn't faze her at all. Which goes to show that you have to question your own perspectives. Here's a clip.

Clip from The Heist:

…the art kids. Do you remember what sports he played or what car he drove? 

He was definitely—grew up on Park Avenue and drove a red Porsche up to school. 

Oh, wait. He drove a red Porsche when he was in high school?

Yes, ma'am, he absolutely did, and was proud to let everybody know it. 

I reached out to some of his other classmates, too, and they also remembered the Porsche. But something else happened that happened a lot while I was reporting on Mnuchin. The closer I got to him, the more closely people seemed to know him, the more worried they were about the consequences of talking to me. A few of them pointed out, hey, this is the guy who runs the IRS. No one wants to be audited.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Tell me how you felt. Go back to that moment when she said, yeah, he drove a red Porsche to school.

Sally Herships 

The problem is that I went to a school—I took the train to school from a few towns over, and no one drove a red Porsche. But people did drive nice cars. So I didn't feel—it wasn't a holy shit moment for me. I was like, Where's the holy shit? 

But, you know, America is a big place, and I am from a small part of it, so I could see that totally being a holy shit moment for a whole lot of people. And we put that moment in for a reason, because it was illustrative. So I think I also already knew about his background. I'm totally spoiling your moment of drama here, but I already knew about his background. I knew he was from a wealthy family, and I knew that he went to this expensive private school. So when she said he drove a red Porsche, I don’t know if I had a holy shit, I had a, like, oh, wow.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

I almost asked you about your delivery. Because I thought, well, maybe you were deliberately restrained because you were a little surprised. Like, wait a minute, this is high school.

Sally Herships 

Yeah, I mean, he came from a pretty wealthy family. His family, I believe,will  get into the art business. He goes to a really expensive college. This is the crowd of people that he moves with, you know? It wasn't super surprising, for me, at least.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

So now you know that in my high school, my nice middle class high school, I never saw anybody drive a Porsche.

Sally Herships 

I mean, I was lucky if I could borrow the keys to the Mazda with the flip down seats in the back. Yeah. I didn't know anyone with a Porsche, but I grew up close to New York City in a commuter suburb. There was a lot of wealth. I saw a lot of things. So it just wouldn't have been shocking. But I can see if I'd grown up someplace different, it would have been a total holy shit moment.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

You're raising a really interesting question, which is, you were self aware enough to say, well, it might not have been surprising to me, but it's probably surprising to a lot of people. 

What do you say to students to say, well, maybe there's another perspective?

Sally Herships 

That's a really good question, and it is something we talk about a lot in class, and I think it comes down to knowing who your audience is. And we tell students to avoid what we call new to me stories. And so in one particular class that I've been teaching at the J School or co teach at the J School, we report for a local Tristate Area audience in New York. So it's New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and we'll get students from all over the world, and we'll have to talk to them about what is a new to you moment. 

So a good example of a new to you or new for me moment would be if a student comes in really excitedly and is like, oh, my God, there are musicians performing music in the New York City subway. We'll say, well, that's new for you. That's not new for your audience. So I think it comes back to asking, who's my audience? 

And then the two questions we always tell students that they need to keep in mind, or three questions. Who is my audience? What does my audience know? What does my audience need to know? 

And so this morning, I was editing a student, and she had written in the name of a neighborhood, and she wrote something like, Red Hook, Brooklyn. And I said, this is for a local audience. You don't need to say Red Hook, Brooklyn. You can just say Red Hook because New York City audience will know where that is. If it was a national audience, you would have a different conversation. You need to tell them where in New York City it is.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

And we could get into a much broader discussion of inclusivity and perspectives that we just bring with us from our identities. But we don't have time for that.

Sally Herships

Go ask ten different people who don't look like you. That's the other thing, because a lot of times we'll tell students, go ask other people, but then they ask people who look like them, their age, and no, you need to ask ten people who don't look like you.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

The other thing that I really liked about this particular little clip of tape where you say, do you remember the sports he played or the car he drove? Interviewers, podcasters, who weren't trained as journalists, and some who have been, often have a really hard time getting specifics or getting scenes out of sources. 

Tell me more about the kinds of questions that you use often and what you teach your students to ask to elicit this kind of specific oh, yeah, he drove a red Porsche at a high school.

Sally Herships 

I mean, the driving question behind this was, who is this guy?

And so I'm really nosy. So I want to know everything. I wanted to know what car—

The showrunner on the project I'm working on now. Her kind of go to question is, like, who would they be in a Hollywood movie? Because it was high school it was the jock, the nerd, the geek. I think it's just, what do we need to know? My source really wanted us to know that he had driven a red Porsche. That was the thing that she was like, listen, this guy drove a red Porsche. That's what you need to know.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

But you asked, though. You asked first.

Sally Herships 

Yeah, I want to know who this person is. What are the things that we think define us as high schoolers? Like, how does a high school student define them? Right? So it's, what kind of car do they drive? The other day, I was talking to a source in England, and I was like, you're in a pub. What's your drink? These kind of ways we have of categorizing ourselves, so that you can sum someone up with some details, I think can be helpful. And then you have to follow up. If someone says, I'm from New York, I want to know where. Upstate Brooklyn? Queens? City? State? Suburbs? Where? So it's follow up, follow up, follow up.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Right. What are you looking at right now? What's the view out your window? 

There's a basic premise in both explanatory and investigative journalism that if you're going to do a story, it's going to be because something is surprising or it seems wrong. But to do that, you have to understand how a system or a process is supposed to work. Remember back in kindergarten, we used to get those pictures where the teacher would say, which one of these things isn't like the other? I wanted to find out how Sally figures out which thing isn't like it's supposed to be.

Clip from The Heist:

If you compare Mnuchin's career so far to other recent Treasury secretaries, it's not that unusual. A lot of them had done time in big business or investment banking, but many had also worked in government before taking on the top job managing the country's money. But Mnuchin's career choices before 2016 show no signs of interest in public service.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

How much reporting went into that one sentence? What's the effort to figure that out?

Sally Herships 

Yeah, I mean, working with the Center for Public Integrity. You know how The Daily, they're like, great, we're going to do an episode on Russia—we'll call Lenny. Right? Like, who covers Russia? At the Center for Public Integrity, they had this wealth of reporters with this great knowledge, so it was not very difficult.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Give me an example of something else in your investigative career where it wasn't that easy to figure out what do you need to know first to know whether this is actually like, back in kindergarten—look at these two pictures. What's out of place?

Sally Herships 

I think the example that comes to mind is from the very first investigative piece I ever did. So I did a story on the way the Department of Defense priced cigarettes and tobacco because I was shopping with a friend whose husband was in the Coast Guard. And we stopped in at the store on the base because if you have any friends or relatives who are service members, you can get really great discounts in the base store. And we were shopping, and she was picking up some alcohol for her mom or her grandma, who loved rum. And when she was going up to pay, I noticed that the cigarettes were super cheap. I mean, super, super cheap. And this was years ago at a time when I had, I think, family members struggling to find health insurance. And I was like, that is so weird. Why are these cigarettes so cheap? On a military base, something seems unusual. 

And so, to find out what was supposed to be the case, I had to do some tracking down and learned that the Department of Defense, like, there's an organization, AAFES, which oversees stores on military bases. I'm trying to remember what it stands for, but there was supposed to be a pricing rule in place that the prices could not be more than 5% below the local lowest price. And so it took a little digging to figure that out. Once I figured that out, I called a store on every base at the time in the continental United States. So I made a spreadsheet, and I just called them, and I was like, how much is a pack of Marlboro Reds? And so that took a year or something crazy. It wasn't so much finding out what was the normal. That was the slightly easier part. It was figuring out, are people breaking the rule? I think that was the harder part.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

I heard that story. I remember hearing that story.

Sally Herships 

Oh, my God.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

It was great.

Okay, so I wanted to ask there's a long explanatory passage about how mortgage lending was supposed to work during the subprime disaster and therefore what Mnuchin did to take advantage of that. And it's a lot of exposition, but it's still gripping, but a lot of reporters and editors are pretty scared of all that exposition without too much tape in there. What's your biggest piece of advice to make that kind of exposition work in audio so that you're still keeping the listeners’ attention?

Sally Herships 

So I think there are different things you can do in this scenario. You can find archival tape. You can get a fantastic jazzy composer to inject moments with drama if they are dramatic, but you don't have supporting tape. Or you can do what I think we did here, which is to find someone who really, really cares and is a great talker to set things up for you and inject it with drama. And that is what I think we did here. We found a guy who was 110% invested and saw Mnuchin as a villain and homeowners in another way and set the stakes for us.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Right, so he sets the stakes. And then that gives you a little bit of luxury of time to do the explanations. And then you came back to him. That guy is Mark Dan. Who—I'm just going to play the next clip.

Clip from The Heist:

And look, I'm not one to cast stones. I've had my own bad experiences in life.

That's Mark Dan. From 2007 to 2008, Mark was Attorney General of Ohio. He resigned amidst a scandal. He'd had an affair with a younger staff member. There were accusations of sexual harassment against one of his deputies. The state legislature was threatening to impeach him. He left under a cloud. Afterwards, he had time on his hands. So he started doing pro bono work representing homeowners who were fighting foreclosures.

I had two beefs with OneWest as a guy representing people whose loans were being serviced by OneWest. One was that in the foreclosure process they were creating fraudulent documents and putting them in front of courts to foreclose on people's homes. So here in Ohio, where we have judicial foreclosure, that's what was happening.

Mark took on twelve cases. He says all the homeowners he represented stayed in their homes. But he can't believe that OneWest got away with so much.

Things can be legal and still be wrong.

In 2015, Mnuchin and the other owners of OneWest sold their bank for almost $2 billion more than they'd bought it for.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

So that passage is just great. But I think as a journalist, it's also a minefield. So clearly, here's a guy with great information who is smack in the middle of this. His sympathies are with the underdog, probably the average listener, but he's completely unreliable. What did you do when you found this gold mine of information but people could easily attack his character?

Sally Herships

Yeah, we talked about it. Obviously, ultimately, we decided to use him. We were fully transparent. He was transparent with us. And I think we decided it was just more important to have him and his perspective in there and try to separate those experiences from the work that he had done representing homeowners and to just let listeners decide for themselves how to feel.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

I mean, we run into unreliable narrators all the time, right? And sometimes we run into people who seem really reliable and we don't think to double check their story.

Talk about that.

Sally Herships 

The more of these kinds of stories I do investigating wrongdoing, the more I'm learning that often, not always, people with knowledge of why things are wrong or how they're wrong may also have that knowledge for a particular reason. This was not one of those cases, right? This guy was not involved in mortgage shenanigans. 

I'm working on a project that looks at financial wrongdoing now. And so people with knowledge of financial wrongdoing, some of them with that inside knowledge, may be party to that knowledge for troubling reasons. 

In terms of reminding students to fact check, you can't trust anything. You have to be skeptical, you have to push back. And when I'm editing student scripts, I usually just write, did you fact check that? Did you fact check that? Did you fact check that on everything?

Elaine Appleton Grant 

I also felt like when I heard—

Basically you're kind of saying, look, here's what we know about this guy before we get to his involvement and his feelings about Mnuchin and the foreclosure operation that he was running. I felt like that served a purpose. Right? Like, wait a minute, we're not going to let you find out later as a surprise because then it ruins the credibility, right?

Sally Herships

Yeah, absolutely. We're going to tell the listener upfront, here's who this guy is. And I think, again, it's important to remind listeners we were doing a piece about politicians. Many, some, many, not all, by any stretch of the imagination—there are a lot of accusations out there about politicians—many of them come with baggage. And so I feel like it is difficult to do a story of this kind and get insider comment and knowledge without running into those kinds of issues. And you have to make a decision, do we include some of that perspective or not? And we chose to include it.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

In stories like this where there's so much information, it can be hard for listeners to remember where they are and what they've learned. And if they get lost, you've lost them. So every now and then, it helps to throw in some signposts. Listen to what Sally does here.

Clip from The Heist:

So here's what we know about Steven Mnuchin so far. He made a lot of money in finance and backed movies with liberal themes in Hollywood. But who is this guy?

Elaine Appleton Grant 

This is like a classic signpost. Okay, listener, here we are. We've been in the woods. We're out of the woods. You're about to turn and go to the beach, but I want you to remember where we've been. How often do you use this method? It's like, I'm going to ground you. Don't worry, you don't have to remember everything. And I'm going to tell you where we're headed, a little bit. 

Do you have ground rules or is it just intuitive? Like, I think we've talked a lot about complicated stuff. It's time to stop and tell you where we are.

Sally Herships 

Yeah, I think this is a moment that I rely on editors a lot. Right. Because oftentimes I think these scripts are co-written or tri-written or quadri-written by so many hands and voices. And as a reporter, you can't see the forest for the trees. You're so focused on the bark on one particular beautiful silver birch that you forget you're in a forest. So that's where editors come in and say, you need to adhere us to where we are on the path through the woods here.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

So I want to ask you sort of quickly some last questions. One is, I think investigative reporting scares newcomers and even people who've done it sometimes. What tips do you have for storytellers listening to this, for how to find hard to find people?

Sally Herships 

It's a numbers game, I think it's a numbers game, but I think ultimately people want to help. And if you ask enough people, you can find someone to take the first step towards helping you, and they will then hopefully point you in the right direction. Here's where you should look next. Here's another name. Here's some context. You might want to look in this place for records. So I think at least until you get the first helpful guide, it's a numbers game.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

A helpful guide, absolutely. What about someone who clams up, who will meet with you but really not say much? Have you had any good tips for breaking through?

Sally Herships 

I think—man, it's hard. I just watched the movie She Said and I really liked the reporter's tip there about the Weinstein case, which was talking, getting victims of Harvey Weinstein to talk to them by saying, we can't change what's happened to you in the past, but together we can try to make sure this awful thing doesn't happen to other women. So far, the different kinds of people who've spoken to me have been angry. They've been angry because something they see as wrong is happening and they want to draw the public's attention to it, or they've been angry because they felt personally wronged and they want to get back something. 

There's also another category of people, maybe people who won't go on the tape, but people still with valuable information, but they always turn out to be troves of information, even if it's just one little fact you can include in your story. And so I think just getting on the phone with those people, because sometimes the things that they mention, really small things, can be a big deal or add color or data to your story.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Who would your dream guest for Sound Judgment be?

Sally Herships 

I mean, my favorite podcast that I've been obsessed with for years is The Missing Cryptoqueen. So I loved that. So Georgia Catt, one of the producers, I would love to hear from about how they did that. It's so fantastic. I feel like these are such team sports that I would be curious to hear—she's a producer, but hear from her and the host together.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Last question. Is there anything that you left on the cutting room floor that was just painful to leave there?

Sally Herships 

I mean, there's this one really goofy thing, and I don't know why I got so obsessed with it. No one else cared. It was the breakfast that Steven Mnuchin had every day at the Treasury. I think it was a boiled egg and a bowl of blueberries. Maybe it was two boiled eggs, and I think there was a silver tray involved. And I don't know why I just was so obsessed with what he had for breakfast. And I think everyone there, everyone used the same fancy trays. So it wasn't just that he was having this fancy meal, but I just kind of loved imagining him eating his egg and blueberries. I think that's what it was.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Well, Sally, thank you so much for your time, and this was fascinating.

Sally Herships 

Thank you so much.

Elaine Appleton Grant 

At the end of every episode, I give you a few of the many takeaways from these conversations. Today's are about how to tackle an investigative story or a long form series, and how to frame what could seem like a tedious topic into something incredibly exciting. 

1. Spend the time you need formulating the central question for your series and central questions for each episode. As the co-executive producer on The Heist, Sally worked with a big team. The hardest part was at the beginning, formulating what they wanted the series to accomplish. Once they did that, it was easier to figure out which powerful characters they would follow in each episode and why.
2. At the heart of a reporting plan is your story pitch: the question like I just mentioned, and an answer. As a professor, one of the biggest mistakes Sally sees students making is writing pitches that are missing the answer. That's a formula for going out there and reporting and finding nothing there. Find out first.
3. When working on an investigation, how do you find people and convince them to talk to you? In addition to contacting hundreds of people, Sally also tweaked her cold email to make it less threatening. Eventually, she found one or two people who were willing to serve as her guides. These are people who leaked her more sources and useful documents. Always ask, who else should I talk to? 

By the way, I discussed the idea of finding a guide, a community champion, in the first episode of Sound Judgment with Stephanie Wittels Wachs. Stephanie hosts Last Day, and she had taken months to find a trusted community guide who helped her get into a pretty closed place in Wisconsin and get one heck of a story. Take a listen for more on how to find such a helpful guide. 

That's all for today. Thanks for being with me. If you liked this episode, you may love Episode 10: Glynn Washington: Lessons from a Master Storyteller. That link’s in our show notes. Please follow us on your listening app. Our goal is to help you make great creative choices every day, and you can help us do that! Take just one minute and give us a five star rating and a short review on Apple Podcasts. Everything you do helps us grow our new show and we are grateful. 

Sound Judgment is produced by me, Elaine Appleton Grant. Sound design by Andrew Parrella. Our gorgeous cover art is by Sarah Edgell, and podcast management by Tina Bassir. See you soon.